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Forum:Proposal:Changes to help wiki editing and navigation
This article follow up on *Forum:Help Wanted - Mad Pages **Which contains most of the ideas that will be organized and presented here. *Forum:Infobox template preloads *Forum:Naming main articles for female characters The last because as part of resolving things User:Argadi ask me to describe some details. The problems Editing main pages Main pages are by consensus and tradition confined to canon and information that comes from the Department of Irrefutably True History. Basically anything not certain must be edited out. There are also different infoboxes associated with different types of main pages. Basically depending on the pages category. Character, House, Monster, etc. I for one always find it impossible to remember the name of the infobox I want and all the parameters that go with it. The solution to this is to have someway to preload that information. Finally, we have a pretty sparking bunch here. A large amount of the fun comes in doing speculation. Mostly all of this speculation is done on an informal, back and forth type manner ideally suited for a forum. When editing a main page many will be inspired to slip into this speculation and will need an immediate outlet for it. By tradition and possible consensus, we have also associated with main pages a page for formal theory. Speculation supported by one or more contributors and organized as a compelling (or not) argument, hypothesis, conjecture, theory. For each main article that page has been called Main article/Mad and is supported by several templates meant to help. In practice, contributors seeking a forum for the article often take their discussion to its mad page. Navigating to the page you want This can be a problem too. This is a placeholder topic. I won't discuss this now. Proposed solutions For each category of main page that we care about it is possible to create a preload page. When a page is being created instead of a blank page to edit the preloaded material is used. During subsequent edits of the page the content of the page is used instead of the preload page. The limitations of this method are: *The preload pages handle markup a little differently than regular pages. **Mostly noinclude markup is actually included with the preload. *To actually use a customized preload page a page must be created with a create box that knows about that page. Creating a page via a red-link will bypass special treatment. **Examples of this are the preloads for Page-by-page whose create boxes have conveniently been place in the page-by-page forums and categories. **Also I have a main page create page in my sandbox User:Rej Maddog/tc/Create Infobox Once a main page is in place we can create associated pages for this page. Basically the associated page would be of the forms *:Forum:Main *:Main/Mad The forum would be used for free form discussion. If that discussion lead to any viable theories they could be presented on the associated mad page. Since one thought generally leads to another it would be nice if these three pages could be linked together. It would also be nice that if an associated page needed to be created it could be created with a suitable preload. I solved this problem a while back by creating a template Template:Edit Mad Forum which will create edit links between the associated pages. It can take an argument to indicate which three pages to associate, or left without one it will use the name of the article for the page that it is on. In the second form it would be ideal to include in the preload for main,forum and mad pages creating an easy way to get from each associated page to the other. I have had this solution available for a while. I was waiting from some experience in small scale use before rolling it out on a large scale basis. The two limitations I've encounter is that I can assure preload pages only by limiting myself to edit links. Direct links would turn into red links for uncreated pages. Following the red links would give the contributor a blank unpreloaded page to work with. The second limitation is the obvious problem that happens when a page is moved. The links will be out of sync in one of several ways.Depending on if the template is used directly or with substitution.